Our current food production and consumption habits are wasteful and unsustainable because they are mostly linear in structure: we take, make, use and dispose.

Intensive agriculture and livestock production use high levels of inputs which are not converted into edible products. Instead they result in non recycled and environmentally damaging outputs - like nutrient run-off from the manure from intensive cattle farms - which cause ocean dead zones, like Chesapeake bay (see below).

The UN FAO estimates one third of the food produced for human consumption is wasted, costing between $1-2 trillion per annum (FAO, 2011). The environmental cost is even higher.

Insects can help us create a food system that moves away from this linear, resource depleting system of intensive farming.

A ‘circular economy’ in agriculture means producing agricultural commodities that use a minimal amount of external inputs, closing nutrient loops and reducing negative discharges to the environment. Insects (and also fungi) can help us to do this.

Looking at our agri-food system from a ‘circular economy’ perspective reveals opportunities to use insects at all stages. From primary production, using precision techniques, to replacing unsustainable soy or fishmeal, to the recycling and utilisation of agricultural waste.

Insects and fungi provide exciting opportunities as many insect species can be reared on organic waste streams, including food production waste and even manure. And fungi are the primary decomposers - returning nutrients to the soil.

Replacing fishmeal and soymeal, as animal feed, prevents destruction of our oceans and jungles, offers a more hypoallergenic natural diet and offers potential improvements to health and welfare through the availability of micro and macro nutrients.

With rapid advancement in rearing techniques there are now remarkable new options for both what to eat, and how to produce enough nutritious food - sustainably - to feed us all. KarmaNutra are committed to developing these options, so that we can produce enough healthy food for all of us - without warming the planet catastrophically, turning our oceans into deserts, exerting wholesale cruelty on billions of factory farmed animals or further reducing the earth’s dwindling biodiversity.